Four decades ago, I and Gerald Markowitz published an article in the American Journal of Public Health that attracted a fair amount of attention. The article was about the history of the introduction of tetraethyl lead into gasoline in the 1920s. The article detailed the controversy over putting lead, even then a known industrial poison and neurotoxin, into the gasoline that was powering the new automobile, particularly those that were produced by the General Motors Company.
Simply put, many in the public health community, including Alice Hamilton, the nation’s leading expert on industrial lead poisoning and Yandell Henderson of Yale were terrified that its introduction and the burning of lead by millions of autos around the country would pollute the air that people breathed and the soil that children played in. One paragraph in the piece told of the efforts by the manufacturers of tetraethyl lead to shape the opinions of public health workers by getting a respected public health leader, Emery Hayhurst, to write a short editorial comment in the AJPH that demeaned those that argued that leaded gasoline could pollute the nation with toxic lead dust, thereby creating a major public health problem. He proudly told the lead gas industry that he was publishing this piece. This was a moment when the auto industry, General Motors, Ford, and a number of smaller companies, were exploding in size and the nation was turning to the auto as its signature means of transportation. Millions of dollars were at stake, and convincing scientists that leaded gasoline was safe, was essential to the future profits of General Motors, Ethyl, Standard Oil, and other parts of the growing auto industry.
The editorial blithely stated that “Observational evidence and reports to various health officials over the country… corroborated the statement of ‘complete safety’ so far as public health is concerned.” Printed as an unsigned editorial it helped quell the worries of the public health community, providing the imprimatur of the profession’s leading journal to the view that leaded gasoline posed no threat to public health. Hayhurst, we discovered, was an unacknowledged consultant to the leaded gasoline manufacturers and car companies and had kept the companies informed of the editorial as he wrote it.
By 1985, pollution generated by leaded gasoline had emerged as a major concern of the public health community and the editors of the journal at the time were alarmed that the AJPH had been an unwitting accomplice in what was then a major public health concern . Public health officials around the country were learning of children poisoned by lead paint from walls and soil poisoned by the fumes of cars that had emitted lead from their tailpipes onto the nations roadways, air, and soil. Upon reading our piece, the editors went to the journal’s archive to discover that Hayhurst was, at the time he wrote the editorial, a member of its editorial committee and therefore had the power to place the piece.
This was obviously embarrassing to the editors who saw their journal having unwittingly exacerbated the 60-year-old tragedy of lead poisoning in America. They added a brief footnote in the text of the article explaining that Hayhurst’s position on the editorial board in the 1920s gave him the authority to place the editorial. But they went even further, they published their own editorial, essentially apologizing for their negligence 60 years earlier and the damage to the nation’s health that they had been a part of. Written by David Ozonoff, a highly respected Professor of Public Health at Boston University, it detailed the tragic impact of the actions of the 1920s that led to the widespread introduction of lead into gasoline and the environment and went on to warn the public health community not to see the incident as merely an anecdote or isolated incident from the past. He warned, “it would be wrong to assume that the sensitivities and concerns of 50 years ago about worker and environmental health were vastly different than they are today. Enough was known about the dangers of lead to have instituted effective preventive measures at that time.” The historical lesson was important for public health professionals to take to heart if future tragedies were to be avoided. “The same could be said for asbestos and perhaps other hazards” today, he admonished.
Ozonoff’s prediction of asbestos being the focus of the historian’s gaze has certainly been affirmed. Just this month, following a letter we wrote to the editorial board of The Lancet telling of research we had done on the origins of a commentary they had published in 1977, the journal, perhaps the world’s most influential and widely read medical journal, looked back on its history to reflect on its unwitting role in the ongoing asbestos tragedy. In 1977 they published an unsigned commentary in its pages that put their imprimatur on the safety of asbestos in talc. With the appearance of The Lancet’s endorsement, the piece stated that “there is no reason to believe that normal consumer exposure to cosmetic talc has in the past led either to cancer at any site or to measurable loss of lung function. It seems unlikely that future exposure to cosmetic talc of the specifications now agreed to by major manufacturers will present a health hazard.” That has obviously been proven wrong, given the hundreds of ovarian cancer cases that have appeared in various courts during the past decade. We provided them with evidence that the author of the commentary was a paid consultant to Johnson & Johnson.
The journal sought to rectify its error, not only publishing our letter revealing how their editorial process had been polluted by the actions and interests of the Johnson & Johnson Company 50 years ago, but also by writing their own commentary, apologizing for their error: “Had The Lancet‘s editors at the time known of this situation and been aware of the author’s undeclared competing interest, they would not have published this commentary.” They then announced their retraction of the piece published a half century ago.
At the time at which Ozonoff wrote about lead there were few historians looking at the history of industry’s role in shaping science and scientific ideas. But, between the early 1990s and today, a number of historians have looked more closely at the way science and its institutions have been affected by industries intent on protecting their products. Of course, the tobacco industry has come under the most intense glare with authors like Allan Brandt and Naomi Oresles at Harvard, Robert Proctor at Stanford, and several others doing path-breaking work. But others, such as Elena Conis at UC Berkeley, have looked at a host of other industries and their duplicitous activities.
The message from these examples is clear: industries have historically tried to manipulate and shape the institutions of science and medicine, and journal editors and scientists need to be aware of the obvious and subtle ways in which they may be manipulated by corporate interests . It should not take decades before a historian uncovers bad actors and bad decisions. Between the time of polluted science and its eventual discovery, thousands of lives end up being sacrificed.
Citation:
Rosner D. Manipulating Science, Manipulating Us. Milbank Quarterly Opinion. April 10, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1599/mqop.2026.0410